ity lays hold of
it and professes to supply it with its true nourishment and support. Let
us look at the characteristics of Christian hope, or, as our text calls
it, the hope of the Gospel, that is, the hope which the Gospel creates
and feeds in our souls.

I. What does it hope for?

The weakness of our earthly hopes is that they are fixed on things which
are contingent and are inadequate to make us blessed. Even when tinted
with the rainbow hues, which it lends them, they are poor and small. How
much more so when seen in the plain colourless light of common day. In
contrast with these the objects of the Christian hope are certain and
sufficient for all blessedness. In the most general terms they may be
stated as 'That blessed hope, even the appearing of the Great God and
our Saviour.' That is the specific Christian hope, precise and definite,
a real historical event, filling the future with a certain steadfast
light. Much is lost in the daily experience of all believers by the
failure to set that great and precise hope in its true place of
prominence. It is often discredited by millenarian dreams, but
altogether apart from these it has solidity and substance enough to bear
the whole weight of a world rested upon it.

That appearance of God brings with it the fulfilment of our highest
hopes in the 'grace that is to be brought to us at His appearing.' All
our blessedness of every kind is to be the result of the manifestation
of God in His unobscured glory. The mirrors that are set round the
fountain of light flash into hitherto undreamed-of brightness. It is but
a variation in terms when we describe the blessedness which is to be the
result of God's appearing as being the Hope of Salvation in its fullest
sense, or, in still other words, as being the Hope of Eternal Life.
Nothing short of the great word of the Apostle John, that when He shall
appear we shall be like Him, exhausts the greatness of the hope which
the humblest and weakest Christian is not only allowed but commanded to
cherish. And that great future is certainly capable of, and in Scripture
receives, a still more detailed specification. We hear, for example, of
the hope of Resurrection, and it is most natural that the bodily
redemption which Paul calls the adoption of the body should first emerge
into distinct consciousness as the principal object of hope in the
earliest Christian experience, and that the mighty working whereby Jesus
is able to subdue all